Just recently we saw the anniversary of The Mummy Demastered, an example of a great game based on the most mediocre of movies. Historically, licensed games — usually movie tie-ins — haven’t enjoyed the best of reputations due to them often being rush jobs thrown together on a shoestring by an under-resourced developer crunching their socks off to make the movie’s release date and, presumably, capitalise on some cross-media marketing synergy and whatnot.
Of course, there are games like GoldenEye 007 that arrived spectacularly late (21 months after the movie!) and proved that a quality game can stand on its own two feet, but despite a general improvement in quality when it comes to licensed games on consoles, there’s still a stigma around them. Licensed games are bad is the prevailing mindset, even if ‘average’ would be a more appropriate adjective.
